Is there a risk of Art Blocks becoming the gatekeeper that controls access to buyers for artists, like in the traditional art world?

I don't think it actually is an old-world problem associated with the traditional art world as much as it's an old-world problem of there being more demand than supply for something. 

That supply and demand equation is happening in two places. It's happening on the selling side. There are times when there's more buyers than NFTs, and a drop has a thousand mints. Usually, there's more than a thousand people sitting on the Discord watching the mint, and so there's just not enough for everybody to have one. 

On the artist side, there's actually, believe it or not, physical limitations of humans and human bandwidth, especially with a growing startup. At one point, the idea of Art Blocks was to have a free for all platform where  anybody can do anything that they wanted. That was the original idea.

Then we found ourselves pouring ourselves into each artist and each drop and really digging into the mechanics of the tools that we're using in the blockchain and how artists feel about dropping art and how the conversation happens after the drop. We realized that we were sitting on something that was well beyond what I originally created for Art Blocks, and in order to make sure that it's a positive and friendly place, we were not willing to sacrifice positivity and inclusivity in exchange for having a completely open platform. 

Unfortunately, as Art Blocks has grown in popularity and the list of applications has grown exponentially, we've had no choice but to start picking and choosing the art. I feel confident that the art that's selected on Art Blocks is based on merit.

What's going to happen—and we mentioned homeostasis earlier—we are nowhere near homeostasis. The problem is when there's too much noise. Let's say Art Blocks is getting a thousand applicants a week. How does merit have an opportunity to shine through the noise? The same thing is going to happen on OpenSea with NFTs minted there and on SuperRare and on any other platform. The more volume you have—both collectors and artists—the more difficult it is for artists to break through. 

In the traditional art world, a lot of people look down on it or struggle with the lack of inclusivity. When you see that, you think, “What is the traditional art world doing?” The traditional art world is finding the artists that they believe have the merit to be exposed publicly. In some cases, maybe it's because it's their son or daughter, or maybe it's because it's their cousin. 

There are other meritocracies that maybe are not involved here, but for the most part, it's the business of a gallery feeling that this artist is going to produce a certain amount of income for them. They are the ones going out there and digging through the noise to find the artists. 

We're not there yet with Art Blocks. We are not going out to find anybody. We have a long, long list of applicants that are interested in deploying art on our platform. While we are unfortunately rejecting a significant amount of those just because we just don't have the manpower, we have a lot of sentiment in the community that we're already doing too many drops. 

If we're doing too many drops instead of tripling the drops because we have tripled the applications, we just triple the difficulty of entering the platform, which means elevating the value of the art that's entering the platform and the ecosystem. 

That will be conflated with the traditional art world's gatekeeping, and the only thing I can say about it is that was not the intention of Art Blocks from the beginning, but I don't know how else you would do it unless you want to do a totally open platform. 

There’s beautiful projects like fxhash, for example, that's on Tezos. It's an incredible place for people to go and mint and create stuff without having to follow these rules or deal with the bureaucracy that is Art Blocks now, because it's gotten kind of bureaucratic in terms of the application process, and you have to sign contracts to put stuff on the platform, and it feels more corporate. If we wanted to, we could start an L2 open platform using our technology in a heartbeat. We could release that in two weeks. Given how much I and our team have been yelled at for things that often feel outside of our control, however, and given some of the tensions that have happened in the past when artists misappropriated other artists' work or utilized code without the right attribution—I don't have the courage or the brainpower or the bandwidth to subject myself and my team to the uncertainty of somebody deploying something that's ripping off another existing artist's work. 

There's already been Squiggles that immediately get shut down by fxhash. I have a lot of respect for them because they shut that down. They can't because it's all decentralized, and I don't think they can truly shut it down. They just have a little banner at the top that says, "Hey, this has been noted as being counterfeit," or whatever. 

We can take two paths. We can take the path of volume and just let everybody do whatever they want, or we can take the path of generative art and nerds. We want to take the path where we are exposed and surrounded by the best freaking art.

You have to decide where are you going to give? To me, we're giving up the open nature of what we're doing, being able to allow any artist on the platform, in exchange for working with the best stuff that's being put out there. It’s a hard decision that was, again, not what we set out to do with Art Blocks, but it very much feels like how I want to lead my life. I want to live my life above the surface and not have to constantly worry about IP issues and the potential of open platforms. What's beautiful about this space is there's room for another five Art Blocks and another five fxhashes, and each of them with their own niche and their own styles. It’s going to be beautiful to see Art Blocks artists then do the circuits between both the Power by Art Blocks and the other platforms.

It's really special to see and let them express themselves in different ways, using the different parameters that all the platforms offer. In the end, we hope that we are helping outside collectors that may or may not be experts at blockchain or experts at NFTs filter through some of the insane amounts of noise that you have on some of these open platforms to be able to just produce the best of the best. It took a while for us to settle and accept that, but we're okay with that.